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Irresponsible cowardice

By Pantelis Boukalas

Even if after so many murders, bomb attacks and robberies, a few people who out of silly sentimentality or obsessive atavism still justified the terrorists' actions, they will already have regretted the mental or ideological rationalizations they attributed to people who never asked for them and never needed them. For even if we only take official statements into consideration, all those who have confessed to their involvement displayed in the end the same attitude that marked them when they were on the slippery slope from the deadly and egocentric «guerrilla war» to common crime. Hidden behind a mask of anonymous arbitrariness, they acted in the name of a people who watched terrorism being used as a huge excuse to diminish democracy. Concealed by their «responsibility to history,» they stayed there so as to avoid any sense of responsibility or guilt, any possibility of having to pretend to be brave. None of the alleged leaders or operatives has found, even at the end, the strength to stand up and publicly assume responsibility (when they were still being interviewed and dismissing the charges as irrational) for their «revolutionary» acts, to state, even with the sincerity of the fanatic, that whatever they did was guided by «revolutionary» logic. And yet others, in other times, real militants, convinced of the rightness of their ideas, sacrificed themselves so as not to betray anyone. The members of November 17 broke easily, and just as easily betrayed others as well as their belief in their alleged ideals. Quite simply, because they had never believed in them. It is now clear how right those people were who insisted that the organization's proclamations should have been left right where their authors used to leave them for journalists, because that was the right place for them, as even their authors themselves seemed to have realized - in the garbage can.